Most diabetes drugs cause us to gain weight. But those in the rather new class of drugs called GLP-1 inhibitors actually lead to weight loss.

People with type 2 diabetes take these drugs by injection. Insulin, the drug that people with type 1 have to inject to manage their diabetes, is notorious for leading to weight gain.

Clinical trial studies show that people with diabetes who take one of these new GLP-1 drugs generally loose weight. I know that they help us lose weight because I lost so much weight myself when my doctor switched me from the older drugs.

That’s why a study that a journal of the American College of Physicians will publish tomorrow is so important to us even though it specifically excluded people with diabetes. The study also excluded anyone who had heart or kidney disease, but it did include 119 men and women with a body mass index of 30 to 45.

With the heat of summer the body often yearns for the cooling sensation of ice cream. This year for the first time since I learned two decades ago that I have diabetes I succumbed to the temptation.

But until now I have refrained from writing about ice cream so as not to lead anyone too far down the slippery slope of gluttony, also known as pigging out. Few of us can limit our indulgence to 1/2 cup or less in a sitting. I can’t.

When it comes to our walking speed, moderation doesn’t seem to be the best policy.

Those of us who have diabetes can manage our blood sugar levels better when we alternate between slow and fast walking, according to a new study. When we walk at a constant pace, we don’t get the reduced blood sugar benefit of our physical activity.

The conclusions of the study fly in the face of the usual recommendations that people with type 2 diabetes should avoid high-intensity exercise out of concern that we might get hurt and because we just aren’t likely to take this advice. Yet, the new study doesn’t show that we get any better blood sugar control unless we do interval training.

More and more studies show that mindfulness and meditation are helping people to manage stress. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is working with veterans who have some of the most severe problems, and they seem to be in the lead in making use of these tools.

But not until now have mindfulness and meditation been studied specifically with veterans who have diabetes. A preliminary study just reported at the annual meeting of the American Association of Diabetes Educators presented some dramatic results that should be applicable to anyone who has diabetes.

A new study of more than 55,000 runners is huge good news for most people with diabetes who are too busy to dedicate a lot of time to physical activity. The experts have been telling us for years that working out is good for our health and happiness, but until now nobody knew how little physical activity we really need.

Intensity is the key that researchers from Iowa State University, the University of South Carolina, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and other institutions discovered. They published their new study last week in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Years ago when I followed a low-glycemic diet I discovered what I thought was something new and wonderful. It was Dreamfields Pasta, advertised as having just “5 net carbs” per serving and being “65% lower glycemic index” than other pastas.

What the Dreamfields Label Used to Claim

In an article I wrote 10 years ago and published on my website as “A Totally New Low-Carb Process” I reported that my personal tests showed that eating Dreamfields Pasta had little, if any, effect on my blood sugar level. So I wrote several articles extolling it between 2004 and 2007.

Now I know that most other people don’t get the same benefit as I did.

For some of us who have diabetes, the trouble with protein is real. If we have existing kidney disease, we can’t handle a lot of protein. If we follow a vegan diet, the problem is to get enough protein.

But for most of us, the trouble with protein is to know how much we need and whether we are getting too much. Many of us think that when we go on a very low-carb diet, we have to boost the amount of protein we eat.

It’s not enough to know just about calories and about two of the macronutrients, carbohydrates and fats. The third macronutrient, protein, often gets too little attention in our personal knowledge base.

Protein is an important component of every cell in our bodies. Our bodies use it to build and repair tissues and to make enzymes, hormones, and other body chemicals. Protein is an important building block of our bones, muscles, cartilage, skin, and blood. Unlike fat and carbohydrates, our bodies don’t store protein, so we regularly need to refill our personal tanks.

If anything we eat deserves the label “health food,” it has to be yogurt. Of all the probiotic foods, yogurt has to be the most popular. The good bacteria in yogurt help protect our bodies from toxins, infections, allergies, and some types of cancer.

In the early 1900s the Russian scientist Ilya Mechnikov discovered that more people lived to the age of 100 in Bulgaria than in any other. He attributed this to yogurt, which was probably invented there and is the mainstay of the traditional Bulgarian diet.

Nowadays it’s an important part of the diet of many people who have diabetes. It’s certainly something I eat regularly, and I have frequently extolled its benefits here.

But until recently I couldn’t find what I knew had to be the best combination of characteristics. I know that I could make it at home and did that at one time, but now I would rather spend my time doing other things.